The Ministry of Transportation and Infrastructure has outlined key changes to the McKenzie Interchange Project since the first round of public consultation held last fall.

Option 2, a partial cloverleaf interchange, was the community's favoured design. Feedback also indicated a desire to see the Burnside Road and McKenzie Avenue intersection improved in tandem with highway improvements.

"We heard strong support to include the intersection of Burnside and McKenzie as part of the project scope. Our design team went back and looked at a number of different options on how we could potentially improve traffic flow at that intersection," said Jenelle Erwin of the Ministry of Transportation and Infrastructure.

The feedback lead to a decision to include a dual turn lane westbound onto the Trans Canada Highway from McKenzie Avenue along with an additional westbound travel lane crossing the Burnside Road and McKenzie Avenue intersection. This option was favoured in lieu of the erroneously identified Burnside Road-Trans Canada Highway on-ramp listed in the recent provincial budget as a component of the interchange project.

"The highway on-ramp from Burnside was just an option that we were looking at but we felt that the improvements to Burnside at McKenzie were a better choice," Erwin said.

Regarding land reclamation from Cuthbert Holmes park, another common issue identified by the public, the Ministry maintains that it will replace any park land required for the interchange.

"If we're impacting the park we want to make sure we're mitigating those impacts. Any park land that we need for the project will be replaced with Ministry right-of-way so there will be no net loss of park land," Erwin confirmed.

Under Option 1, a diamond interchange, 0.25 hectares of park land would be impacted while the most popular option, the partial cloverleaf design as outlined in Option 2, would necessitate reclaiming 1.4 hectares.

The $85 million project will begin this fall and is expected to be completed in 2018. The public has until early March to submit additional feedback based on the latest design changes revealed on February 24th. C

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